Rants & Reviews

April 2017

24 April 2017

I finished Rebecca Skloot’s mesmerizing best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks two days ago, just in time for all the hype surrounding the HBO film of the book being shown last night. Here is imdb.com’s brief summary of the film: “An African-American woman becomes an unwitting pioneer for medical breakthroughs when her cells are used to create the first immortal human cell line in the early 1950s.”

(Practical tip: I don’t get HBO so I called Comcast. I was assured that I could sign up for HBO and cancel after one day and only pay for that day - which I have done.)

The most gripping narrative thread in the book (I listened to the audiobook in my car) is the element of forensic detective work by the tempestuous partnership between the author/narrator and Henrietta Lacks’s daughter Deborah. Together they teach themselves enough cell science to really figure out what happened to Henrietta’s cells. It is that journey of self-education, their exposure of shady ethics and insidious racism among many scientists working with the cells, the role of profit and exploitation in science, and the clarification of obfuscating scientific concepts that make the book so riveting. I thought it was fitting that HBO premiered the film (probably unwittingly) on the same day as the Science March.

It is through that journey that Rebecca and Deborah build an alliance and then a close friendship, which in turn brings Rebecca further into the Lacks family where she can both increase and share her knowledge.

HBO, however, decided to use their distinguished cast – Ophra Winfrey as Deborah, Rose Byrne as Rebecca, Courtney B. Vance, Leslie Uggams, and others in supporting roles – to focus on the human emotions by filling in so many family narrative gaps that the film seems to fictionalize a non-fiction book. Although the acting was excellent across the board, HBO chose to shortchange both the science and some of the context in favor of the drama. They did so in a superficial way, as well.

For example, Deborah’s changing moods, her jubilance and her despair, were functions (according to the book) not only of the tragedies and barriers she experienced in her life, but also of the pills she took when self-medicating. Poverty kept the Lacks family in the wretched category of the medically uninsured – despite the uncounted millions of dollars scientists and industrialists made off Henrietta’s immortal cancer cells. Even Deborah’s grandchild understood the correlation between one drug or another and the resulting mood. Another example is the absence of the back-story of Deborah's troubled brother Zakariyya (played brilliantly by Reg E. Cathey), who was brutally abused as a boy. By airbrushing the story, HBO’s film delivers a somewhat distorted and unclear emotional picture - one in which this Black family appears inexplicably dysfunctional.

My recommendation is that you read the book first – of course that is always my recommendation. Form your own sense of the key relationships and of the central themes. I’d love to hear from others who knew the book before they saw the film. Was this a somewhat missed opportunity for HBO?